Exascale computing, which has been long talked about, is now – if everything remains on track – only a few years away. Billions of dollars are being spent worldwide to develop systems capable of an exaflops of computation, which is 50 times the performance of the most capacious systems the current Top500 supercomputer rankings and will usher in the next generation of HPC workloads.

As we have talked about at The Next Platform, China is pushing ahead with three projects aimed at delivering exascale systems to the market, with a prototype – dubbed the Tianhe-3 – being prepped for …

It is convenient, perhaps, that large scale computing evolved just about the time the easiest and biggest strikes for oil and natural gas were over. Since the 1950s, energy companies have always been early adopters of advanced computing, networking, and storage technologies because accurate seismic processing to reveal the structures of the depths of the Earth’s crust is the only practical way to find oil and natural gas and manage their reservoirs of those hydrocarbons.